Building a European Bank of Anchor Items for Foreign Language Skills (EBAFLS)

Aim of the project
The partnership had as its main objective to investigate the possibility of producing (a) calibrated set(s) of anchor items, or banks of anchor items.
If anchors were available with a known CEFR level, each testing body could link these to their own tests and or examinations and provide empirical evidence for the CEFR level of their foreign language certificates or diplomas. In this way it would be possible to take national statistics of language competence and describe these in terms of CEFR levels. The ambition was that, thereby, language assessment could be made more transparent, reliable and valid. And at the same time every country would be able to keep their traditional assessment methods.

Methodology of the project
EBAFLS focused on CEFR level B1, and included levels A2 and B2 to define level B1. The eight participating countries undertook to provide items which were to cover reading and listening comprehension in three foreign languages (English (EN), French (FR), German (DE)). Each item was pretested in at least two different countries. Standard Setting was carried out in the participating countries as part of the linking procedure.

Products of the project

• item banks for: EN reading, EN listening, FR reading, FR listening, DE reading and DE listening;
• a manual for educational institutions with guidelines for the use of the item banks;
• reports on the validity and reliability of the banks.

Item bank
An item bank is a collection of items constructed in such a way that the achievement level of any two persons can meaningfully be compared independently of which items from the bank are administered to a candidate.

Results of the project
The results of both pretests and standard setting seem to indicate that items constructed in a particular country cannot be used in another country just like that. In practice, the described level B1 of the CEFR does not seem the same for every target language and every country.

Sample items
A selection has been made from the item material submitted by the eight participating countries. At the top of this page you will find tasks for English, French and German reading comprehension. A task consists of an input text and one or more items. These sample items are representative of the enormous variety of item material from the participating countries. The coding guides have not been published, since these can only be finalized when the items have been pretested.

For reasons of confidentiality, no information about the origin of the items can be given.